In his first column as PBS ombudsman, Michael Getler faults PBS and producers of Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories for a “flawed presentation.” He writes: “There was a complete absence of some of the fundamental journalistic conventions that, in fact, make a story more powerful and convincing because they, at a minimum, acknowledge that there is another side.”

New York’s WNYE-FM is simulcasting music programming from XM Satellite Radio, reports Radio and Records. (Via DCRTV.)

Fox News Channel announced that it will add the Journal Editorial Report to its lineup in January. Developed for PBS, the show has been at the heart of the Kenneth Tomlinson balance controversy. It will appear on PBS for the last time Dec. 2. “Roger Ailes and the Fox News Channel team have proven they can attract viewers with serious news programming and commentary,” said Paul Gigot, the show’s host and editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal. “I look forward to working with them to make the Journal Editorial Report part of their successful lineup.”

Humorist Andy Borowitz imagines that President Bush considered bombing NPR in advance of the Iraq War until British Prime Minister Tony Blair talked him out of it.

CPB Ombudsman Ken Bode responds to criticisms of the PBS program Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories, “[T]his broadcast is so slanted as to raise suspicions that either the family courts of America have gone crazy or there must be another side to the story.”

Online Journalism Review‘s Mark Glaser examines NPR’s podcasting strategy and, in a signoff from OJR, notes that he’s working with PBS.org.

WFMU’s blog links to a video of Barney “channeling Tupac Shakur.”

Nova‘s recent special on New Orleans, The Storm that Drowned a City, was too easy on the Bush administration, writes author Paul Loeb in a WorkingForChange critique.

“China is a singularly difficult story to tell because there is SO MUCH good and SO MUCH bad all happening simultaneously,” says Rob Gifford, who covers China for NPR, in an interview with Leonard Witt.

In the New York Times today and the Washington Post yesterday editorialists derided former CPB Chair Ken Tomlinson — in the Times as a “disastrous zealot” and in the Post as “a triumph of ‘politics over good judgment'”. They followed similar views published in the Toledo Blade and elsewhere. Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, however, said the true scandal is that taxpayers are “conscripted” to pay for media.

NPR’s Anne Garrels tells the Hartford Courant about traveling with a company of Marines in Iraq: “[T]hey were so disappointed that I was NPR. They didn’t know what NPR was, but they wanted Fox!” (Via Romenesko.)

In a feature at Poynter.org, NPR’s Bill Marimow and Daniel Zwerdling share stories of how their work has made a difference.

The future of KUT-FM in Austin, Texas, includes a major fundraising effort and the possibility of a different relationship to its university parent, reports the Austin Chronicle.

The New York Times checks in with a high school radio station in Indianapolis whose license was challenged by a religious broadcaster. Dozens of stations around the country have faced similar challenges in recent years.

Breaking the Silence: Children’s Stories, a PBS documentary about domestic abuse, has come under a withering blogosphere attack for unfairly vilifying fathers. Men’s advocacy groups and experts co-signed a letter to PBS challenging the film’s journalistic rigor and one of the fathers named in the film threatened to sue for libel. Op-eds published by Fox News and the Boston Globe this week comment on the controversy. Glenn Sacks, a columnist and advocate for men’s rights, leads the e-mail campaign, and has published court documents that paint a different picture of a mother portrayed heroicly in Breaking the Silence.